twelfth

Spelling & Dictionary Insight

The English entry for twelfth is 7 letters long, classified as anadj, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /twɛlfθ/ [tʰw̥ɛɫfθ]. Corpus data places it at rank #14,859 in overall English word frequency, marking it as uncommon enough that many writers pause before typing it.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "The ordinal form of the number twelve, describing a person or thing in position number 12 of a sequence.".

Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for twelfth, with forms such as "tewlfth", "ttwelfth", and "tweflth". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.

Etymologically, the entry records: From Middle English twelfthe, twelfte, from Old English twelfta (“twelfth”), from Proto-Germanic *twaliftô (“twelfth”), equivalent to twelve + -th (ordinal suffix). Cognate with Scots twalt (“twelfth”), Saterland Frisian tweelfte (“twelfth”), West Frisian t… Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is twelfth, spelled T-W-E-L-F-T-H, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.